metadata Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...

, a vocabulary-based transformation (VBT) is a transformation aided by the use of a

semantic equivalence {{about, semantic equivalence of metadata, the concept in mathematical logic, Logical equivalence In computer metadata, semantic equivalence is a declaration that two data elements from different vocabularies contain data that has similar meaning. ...

statements within a

controlled vocabulary Control may refer to: Basic meanings Economics and business * Control (management), an element of management * Control, an element of management accounting * Comptroller (or controller), a senior financial officer in an organization * Controlling ...

. Many organizations today require communication between two or more computers. Although many standards exist to exchange data between computers such as

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...

email Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" meant ...

, there is still much structured information that needs to be exchanged between computers that is not standardized. The process of mapping one source of data into another is often a slow and labor-intensive process. VBT is a possible way to avoid much of the time and cost of manual data mapping using traditional

extract, transform, load In computing, extract, transform, load (ETL) is a three-phase process where data is extracted, transformed (cleaned, sanitized, scrubbed) and loaded into an output data container. The data can be collated from one or more sources and it can also ...

technologies.

History

The term ''vocabulary-based transformation'' was first defined by Roy Shulte of the

Gartner Group Gartner, Inc is a technological research and consulting firm based in Stamford, Connecticut that conducts research on technology and shares this research both through private consulting as well as executive programs and conferences. Its clients ...

around May 2003 and appeared in annual " hype-cycle" for

integration Integration may refer to: Biology *Multisensory integration *Path integration * Pre-integration complex, viral genetic material used to insert a viral genome into a host genome *DNA integration, by means of site-specific recombinase technology, ...

Application

VBT allows computer systems integrators to more automatically "look up" the definitions of data elements in a centralized

data dictionary A data dictionary, or metadata repository, as defined in the ''IBM Dictionary of Computing'', is a "centralized repository of information about data such as meaning, relationships to other data, origin, usage, and format". ''Oracle'' defines it ...

and use that definition and the equivalent mappings to transform that data element into a foreign

namespace In computing, a namespace is a set of signs (''names'') that are used to identify and refer to objects of various kinds. A namespace ensures that all of a given set of objects have unique names so that they can be easily identified. Namespaces ...

. The

Web Ontology Language The Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a family of knowledge representation languages for authoring ontologies. Ontologies are a formal way to describe taxonomies and classification networks, essentially defining the structure of knowledge for vario ...

(OWL) language also support three

statements.

Companies or products

IONA Technologies IONA Technologies was an Irish software company founded in 1991. It began as a campus company linked to Trinity College Dublin had its headquarters in Dublin, and eventually also expanded its offices in Boston and Tokyo. It specialised in dist ...

Contivo and Delta
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Liaison Technologies
* enLeague Systems * ItemField * Unicorn Solutions * Vitria Technology * Zonar

External links

Gartner Glossary of Terms
Gartner definition Vocabulary-based transformation
Gartner Hype Cycle 2003
{{DEFAULTSORT:Vocabulary-Based Transformation Data management

History

Application

Companies or products

See also

External links